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Christmas really sucks sometimes. Like, really sucks, and for a whole slew of reasons. Maybe you didn’t get whatever present you wanted or maybe you’re stuck dealing with some bitchy family members. Maybe you’re just alone and suicidal, again. The reasons are generally very personal, but there’s no denying the holiday can be tricky at times.

In 2010, Mike Brown and I were pissed off to all hell. Not only did we not have any clue what we were doing with our lives, but a friend of ours who had been hit by a car and was in lying in a coma in critical condition. The latter was the particular catalyst for setting us off on our path of destruction, and the former purely flamed the fire. But when it really comes down to it, the whole thing was about girls.

Earlier that summer, I’d driven across the country from New Orleans to Salt Lake City with the sole intention of laying it all out on a line for a girl, who promptly rejected me. I really should have taken that into consideration after the first time I’d done that, leaving San Francisco for the same girl with the same result. Clearly I’m either a slow learner or a glutton for punishment. I really liked that girl, and the whole thing was making me completely unhinged.

Mike Brown on the other hand, he was dealing with a complete lush who tended to be coked up out of her mind most of the time. She’d been calling and yelling at him all night, and Mike had had enough. We drank whiskey and discussed all these bullshit things that were making us angry and frustrated, and I vaguely remember asking Mike, “What the fuck are we supposed to do about any of it?”

Mike said something and punched the fridge. I punched the fridge too, so Mike kicked it and dented in the door. This caused me to throw a plate on the ground. Mike thought that was a great idea and smashed a plate that we’d always hated. That’s when I pulled out the hammers. What followed was 45 plus minutes of me somehow filming us as we held a drunken conversation about women and life, shattering all of our dishes with hammers in the process.

If you watch all the videos, you get an idea for the level of communication that Mike and I have between each other. Sure, we might be hammering the handle off our frying pan, but we’re also talking honestly about how we feel. For instance, at one point I ask Mike what he’s looking for a girl, and he didn’t hesitate to say the truth. “Awesome boobs. Awesome boobs and that’s pretty much it. I’ve tried to look for everything else and I can’t find it,” he said. “So what else is there than awesome boobs?”

Later I filmed him getting dumped by the girl in question. Looking back, it’s pretty weird that I felt comfortable keeping the camera on him in awkward silence as some girl explains why they’re done over the phone. I’m glad I did it though, because the last line he says after she hangs up is priceless. We were completely out of control, and somehow acting reasonable because of it.

After about an hour of mayhem, our downstairs neighbor came up to check on us, worried that someone had broken into our place and was breaking our legs with baseball bats. We let him know that no, we were fine, and yes, we could see why the noise of us smashing everything with hammers could be disconcerting at 3:30 AM. Since we no longer could use our preferred instrument of destruction, we moved on to fireworks. Those worked pretty well for the moment, but once we were out, we were out, and by that I mean I have no idea what happened until I woke up the next morning.

Now, at that period in time, waking up with no memory of the night before was uncomfortably common enough to be kind of comfortable due to it’s constancy. I didn’t think anything of it, except that there did seem to be an unexpected amount of glass in bed with me. I looked up from where I was laying and stared into the kitchen.

Ah…

Yes…

Fuck.

Fuck indeed. The floor was glittering with glass like the rejects from a tinsel factory. Thankfully I was still wearing my shoes, so gingerly I got up, stepped over my sweater that now had giant holes burned through it from an errant fireball, and took a look around the kitchen. The burn marks on the walls looked fairly manageable, and I figured, hey, fuck those dishes anyway, we can replace them. The fridge was pretty fucked up, but I mean, of course it was. Oh and hey, there’s still a little whiskey left! Better get to this before Mike gets up. Fuck it.

After I realized I’d videotaped the whole thing for god knows what reason, I cut up a few choice moments and threw them up on Youtube. All of our friends thought we did this shit all of the time, and really wanted to come by some night and help us smash all of our things. We thought about trying to charge people for the experience but decided that anyone who would actually be willing to pay wasn’t the type of person we wanted in our house. Instead we simply enjoyed not having to wash dishes. (This of course refers mostly to me; Mike Brown never washed dishes). Either way, Mike’s wounds healed and we didn’t get evicted out of our apartment, and Christmas otherwise passed without incident. Like Morrissey says, things could always be worse, right?

Here’s the first video of Mike Brown and I having a surprisingly rational conversation as we smash everything in our kitchen to oblivion. Enjoy!